NOS4A2 A Novel

BAD MOTHER

DECEMBER 16, 2011–

JULY 6, 2012





Lamar Rehabilitation Center, Massachusetts


LOU BROUGHT THE BOY TO VISIT FOR AN EARLY CHRISTMAS, WHILE Vic McQueen was in rehab, doing her twenty-eight days. The tree in the rec room was made of wire and tinsel, and the three of them ate powdered doughnuts from the supermarket.

“They all crazy in here?” Wayne asked, no shyness in him, never had been any.

“They’re all drunks,” Vic said. “The crazies were in the last place.”

“So is this an improvement?”

“Upward mobility,” Lou Carmody told him. “We’re all about the upward mobility in this family.”





Haverhill


VIC WAS RELEASED A WEEK LATER, DRY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER adult life, and she went home to watch her mother die, to witness Linda McQueen’s heroic attempts to finish herself off.

Vic helped, bought her mom cartons of the Virginia Slims she liked and smoked them with her. Linda went on smoking even when she had only one lung left. A battered green oxygen tank stood next to the bed, the words HIGHLY FLAMMABLE printed on the side above a graphic of red flames. Linda would hold the mask to her face for a hit of air, then lower the mask and take a drag off her cigarette.

“It’s okay, innit? You aren’t worried—” Linda jerked a thumb meaningfully at the oxygen tank.

“What? That you’ll blow up my life?” Vic asked. “Too late, Mom. Beat you to it.”

Vic had not spent a day in the same house with her mother since leaving the place for good the summer she turned eighteen. She had not realized, as a child, how dark it was inside her childhood home. It stood in the shade of tall pines and received almost no natural light at all, so that even at noon you had to switch lights on to see where the hell you were going. Now it stank of cigarettes and incontinence. By the end of January, she was desperate to escape. The darkness and lack of air made her think of the laundry chute in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House.

“We should go someplace for the summer. We could rent a place up on The Lake, like we used to.” She didn’t need to say Lake Winnipesaukee. It had always just been The Lake, as if there were no other body of water worth mentioning, in the same way The Town had always meant Boston. “I’ve got money.”

Not so much, actually. She had managed to drink up a fair portion of her earnings. Much of what she hadn’t swallowed had been devoured by legal fees or paid out to various institutions. There was still enough, though, to leave her in a better financial position than the average recovering alcoholic with tattoos and a criminal record. There would be more, too, if she could finish the next Search Engine book. Sometimes she thought she had gotten sane and sober to finish the next book, God help her. It should’ve been for her son, but it wasn’t.

Linda smiled in a sly, drowsy way that said they both knew she wasn’t going to make it to June, that she would be vacationing that summer three blocks away, in the cemetery, where her older sisters and her parents were buried. But she said, “Sure. Get your boy offa Lou, bring him along. I’d like to spend some time with that kid—if you don’t think it would ruin him.”

Vic let that one go. She was working on the eighth step of her program and was here in Haverhill to make amends. For years she had not wanted Linda to know Wayne, to be a part of his life. She took pleasure in limiting her mother’s contact with the boy, felt it was her job to protect Wayne from Linda. She wished now there had been someone to protect Wayne from herself. She had amends to make to him, too.

“You could introduce your father to his grandson while you’re at it,” Linda said. “He’s there, you know. In Dover. Not far from The Lake. Still making things go boom. I know he’d love to meet the boy.”

Vic let that one go, too. Did she need to make amends to Christopher McQueen as well? Sometimes she thought so—and then she remembered him rinsing his raw knuckles under cold water and dismissed the notion.

It rained all spring, cornering Vic inside the Haverhill house with the dying woman. Sometimes the rain fell so hard it was like being trapped inside a drum. Linda coughed fat blobs of red-specked phlegm into a rubber trough and watched the Food Network with the volume turned up too loud. Getting away—getting out—began to seem a desperate thing, a matter of survival. When Vic shut her eyes, she saw a flat reach of lake at sunset, dragonflies the size of swallows gliding over the surface of the water.

But she didn’t decide to rent a place until Lou called one night from Colorado to suggest Wayne and Vic spend the summer together.

“Kid needs his mom,” Lou said. “Don’t you think it’s time?”

“I’d like that,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level. It hurt to breathe. It had been a good three years since she and Lou had hung it up. She couldn’t stomach being loved so completely by him and doing so poorly by him in return. Had to deal herself out.

It was one thing to quit on Lou, though, and another to quit on the boy. Lou said the kid needed his mother, but Vic thought she needed Wayne more. The prospect of spending the summer with him—of starting again, taking another shot at being the mother Wayne deserved—gave Vic flashes of panic. Also flashes of brilliant, shimmering hope. She didn’t like to feel things so intensely. It reminded her of being crazy.

“You’d be okay with that? Trusting him with me? After all the shit I pulled?”

“Aw, dude,” he said. “If you’re ready to get back in the ring, he’s ready to climb in there with you.”

Vic didn’t mention to Lou that when people climbed into the ring together, it was usually to clobber the shit out of each other. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad metaphor. God knew Wayne had plenty of valid reasons for wanting to throw a few roundhouses her way. If Wayne needed a punching bag, Vic was ready to take the hits. It would be a way of making amends.

How she loved that word. She liked that it almost sounded like “amen.”

She began to hunt, feverishly, for a place to spend the summer, somewhere that would match the picture in her head. If she’d still possessed her Raleigh, she could have found her way to the perfect spot in a matter of minutes, one quick trip across the Shortaway and back. Of course, she knew now that there had never been any trips across the Shorter Way Bridge. She had learned the truth about her finding expeditions while she was in a Colorado mental hospital. Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go—or got careless and crushed it.

Without the Shorter Way, Vic had to rely on Google, same as everyone else. It took her until late April to find what she wanted, a spinster’s cottage with a hundred feet of frontage, its own dock, float, and carriage house. It was all on one floor, so Linda wouldn’t have to climb any stairs. By then a part of Vic really believed that her mother was coming with them, that amends would be made. There was even a ramp around the back of the house, for Linda’s wheelchair.

The real-estate agent sent a half dozen full-page glossies, and Vic climbed up onto her mother’s bed to look at them with her.

“See the carriage house? I’ll clean it out and make an artist’s studio. I bet it smells great in there,” Vic said. “Bet it smells like hay. Like horses. I wonder why I never went through a horse phase. I thought that was mandatory for spoiled little girls.”

“Chris and me never exactly killed ourselves spoiling you, Vicki. I was afraid to. Now I don’t even think a parent can. Spoil a child, I mean. I didn’t figure nothing out until it was too late to do me any good. I never seemed to have much of a feel for parenting. I was so scared of doing the wrong thing I hardly ever did the right thing.”

Vic tried out a few different lines in her head. You and me both was one. You did your best—which is more than I can say of myself was another. You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better was a third. But she couldn’t find her voice—her throat had gone tight—and the moment passed.

“Anyway,” Linda said. “You didn’t need a horse. You had your bike. Vic McQueen’s Fast Machine. Take you farther than any horse ever could. I looked for it, you know. A couple years ago. I thought your father stuck it in the basement, and I had an idea I could give it to Wayne. Always thought it was a bike for a boy. But it was gone. Don’t know where it disappeared to.” She was quiet, her eyes half closed. Vic eased off the bed. But before she could get to the door, Linda said, “You don’t know what happened to it, do you, Vic? Your Fast Machine?”

There was something sly and dangerous in her voice.

“It’s gone,” Vic said. “That’s all I know.”

Her mother said, “I like the cottage. Your lake house. You found a good place, Vic. I knew you would. You were always good at that. At finding things.”

Vic’s arms bristled with gooseflesh.

“Get your rest, Mom,” she said, moving to the door. “I’m glad you like the place. We should go up there sometime soon. It’s ours for the summer after I sign the papers. We should break it in. Have a couple days there, just the two of us.”

“Sure,” her mother said. “We’ll stop at Terry’s Primo Subs on the way back. Get ourselves milkshakes.”

The already dim room seemed to darken briefly, as if a cloud were moving across the sun.

“Frappes,” Vic said, in a voice that was rough with emotion. “If you want a milkshake, you have to go somewhere else.”

Her mother nodded. “That’s right.”

“This weekend,” Vic said. “We’ll go up there this weekend.”

“You’ll have to check my calendar,” her mother said. “I might have plans.”

The rain stopped the next morning, and instead of taking her mother to Lake Winnipesaukee that weekend Vic took her to the graveyard and buried her beneath the first hot blue sky of May.


SHE CALLED LOU AT ONE IN THE MORNING EAST COAST TIME, ELEVEN o’clock Mountain time, and said, “What do you think he’ll want to do? It’s going to be two months. I don’t know if I can keep Wayne entertained for two days.”

Lou seemed utterly baffled by the question. “He’s twelve. He’s easy. I’m sure he’ll like all the things you like. What do you like?”

“Maker’s Mark.”

Lou made a humming sound. “You know, I guess I was thinking more like tennis.”

She bought tennis rackets, didn’t know if Wayne knew how to play. It had been so long for herself that she couldn’t even remember how to score. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

She bought swimsuits, flip-flops, sunglasses, Frisbees. She bought suntan lotion, hoping he wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time in the sun. In between her stints in the crazy house and rehab, Vic had finished getting her arms and legs fully sleeved in tattoos, and too much sun was poison on the ink.

She had assumed that Lou would fly to the East Coast with him and was surprised when Lou gave her Wayne’s flight number and asked her to call when he got in.

“Has he ever flown alone?”

Lou said, “He’s never flown at all, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Dude. The kid is pretty solid at taking care of himself. He’s been doing it for a while. He’s, like, twelve going on fifty. I think he’s more excited about the flight than he is about getting there.” This was followed by an awkward, embarrassed silence. “Sorry. That totally came out more douchey than I meant it to.”

“It’s okay, Lou,” she said.

It didn’t bother her. There was nothing Lou or Wayne could say that would bother her. She had every bit of it coming. All those years of hating her own mother, Vic had never imagined she would do worse.

“Besides. He isn’t really traveling alone. He’s coming with Hooper.”

“Right,” she said. “What’s he eat anyway?”

“Usually whatever is on the floor. The remote control. Your underwear. The rug. He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper. You remember the tiger shark? He had a license plate in his stomach?”

“I never saw Jaws. I caught one of the sequels on TV in rehab. The one with Michael Caine.”

Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering.

“Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.

Three days later she was at Logan Airport at 6:00 A.M., standing at the window in the concourse to watch Wayne’s 727 taxi across the apron and up to the Jetway. Passengers emerged from the tunnel and streamed by her, hurrying in silent bunches, rolling carry-ons behind them. The crowd was thinning, and she was trying not to feel any anxiety—where the hell was he? Did Lou give her the right flight information? Wayne wasn’t even in her custody yet, and she was already f*cking up—when the kid strolled out, arms wrapped around his backpack as if it were his favorite teddy bear. He dropped it, and she hugged him, snuffled at his ear, gnawed at his neck until he laugh-shouted for Vic to let him go.

“Did you like flying?” she asked.

“I liked it so much I fell asleep when we took off and missed the whole thing. Ten minutes ago I was in Colorado, and now I’m here. Isn’t that insane? Going so far just all of a sudden like that?”

“It is. It’s completely insane,” she said.

Hooper was in a dog carrier the size of a baby’s crib, and it took both of them to wrestle him off the luggage carousel. Drool swung from the big Saint Bernard’s mouth. Inside the cage the remains of a phone book lay around his feet.

“What was that?” Vic asked. “Lunch?”

“He likes to chew on things when he’s nervous,” he said. “Same as you.”

They drove back to Linda’s house for turkey sandwiches. Hooper snacked on a can of wet food, one of the new pairs of flip-flops, and Vic’s tennis racket, still in the plastic wrap. Even with the windows open, the house smelled of cigarette ash, menthol, and blood. Vic couldn’t wait to go. She packed the swimsuits, her bristol boards and inks and watercolors, the dog, and the boy she loved but was afraid she didn’t know or deserve, and they hauled it north for the summer.

Vic McQueen Tries to Be a Mother, Part II, she thought.

The Triumph was waiting.





Lake Winnipesaukee


THE MORNING WAYNE FOUND THE TRIUMPH, VIC WAS DOWN ON THE dock with a couple of fishing rods she couldn’t untangle. She had discovered the rods in a closet in the cottage, rust-flecked relics of the eighties, the monofilament lines bunched up in a fist-size snarl. Vic thought she had seen a tackle box in the carriage house and sent Wayne to look for it.

She sat on the end of the dock, shoes and socks off, feet trailing in the water, to wrestle with the knot. When she was on coke—yeah, she had done that, too—she could’ve struggled with the knot for a happy hour, enjoying it as much as sex. She would’ve played that knot like Slash hammering out a guitar solo.

But after five minutes she quit. No point. There would be a knife in the tackle box. You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherf*cker loose.

Besides, the way the sun was flashing on the water hurt her eyes. Especially the left. Her left eye felt solid and heavy, as if it were made of lead instead of soft tissue.

Vic stretched out in the heat to wait for Wayne to return. She wanted to doze, but every time she drifted off, she twitched awake all of a sudden, hearing the crazygirl song in her head.

Vic had heard the crazygirl song for the first time when she was in the mental hospital in Denver, which was where she went after she burned the town house down. The crazygirl song had only four lines, but no one—not Bob Dylan, not John Lennon, not Byron or Keats—had ever strung together four lines of such insightful and emotionally direct verse.

No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song!

And I’m going to sing it all night long!

Vic wishes she could ride her f*cking bike away!

Might as well wish for a ride in Santa’s sleigh!

This song had woken her on her very first evening in the clinic. A woman was singing it somewhere in the lockdown. And she wasn’t just singing it to herself; she was serenading Vic directly.

The crazygirl scream-shouted her song three or four times a night, usually just when Vic was drifting off to sleep. Sometimes the crazygirl got to laughing so hard she couldn’t carry the tune all the way through to the end.

Vic did some screaming, too. She screamed for someone to shut that cunt up. Other people yelled, the whole ward would get to yelling, everyone screaming to be quiet, to let them sleep, to make it stop. Vic screamed herself hoarse, until the orderlies came in to hold her down and put the needle in her arm.

In the day Vic angrily searched the faces of the other patients, looking for signs of guilt and exhaustion. But all of them looked guilty and exhausted. In group-therapy sessions, she listened intently to the others, thinking the midnight singer would give herself away by having a hoarse voice. But they all sounded hoarse, from the difficult nights, the bad coffee, the cigarettes.

Eventually the evening came when Vic stopped hearing from the crazygirl with her crazy song. She thought they had moved her to another wing, finally showing some consideration for the other patients. Vic had been out of the hospital for half a year before she finally recognized the voice, knew who the crazygirl had been.

“Do we own the motorcycle in the garage?” Wayne asked. And then, before she had time to process the question, he said, “What are you singing?”

She hadn’t realized she was whispering it to herself until that very moment. It sounded much better in a soft voice than it did when Vic had been scream-laughing it in the loony bin.

Vic sat up, rubbing her face. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

Wayne gave her a dark and doubtful look.

He made his way out onto the dock in mincing, effortful steps, Hooper slouching along behind like a tame bear. Wayne carried a big, battered yellow toolbox, clutched the handle in both hands. A third of the way out, he lost his grip, and it dropped with a crash. The dock shook.

“I got the tackle box,” Wayne said.

“That’s not a tackle box.”

“You said look for a brown box.”

“That’s yellow.”

“It’s brown in spots.”

“It’s rusted in spots.”

“Yeah? So? Rust is brown.”

He unbuckled the toolbox, pushed back the lid, frowned at the contents.

“Easy mistake,” she said.

“Is this maybe for fishing?” he asked, and pulled out a curious instrument. It looked like the blade of a dull miniature scythe, small enough to fit in his palm. “It’s shaped like a hook.”

Vic knew what it was, although it had been years since she’d seen one. Then she registered, at last, what Wayne had said when he first walked out onto the dock.

“Let me see that box,” Vic said.

She turned it around to stare in at a collection of flat, rusted wrenches, an air-pressure gauge, and an old key with a rectangular head, the word TRIUMPH stamped into it.

“Where’d you find this?”

“It was on the seat of the old motorcycle. Did the motorcycle come with the house?”

“Show me,” Vic said.